Furniture or more visitors? There isn’t room for both.
Roger White is concerned about furniture going into storage and about the impact of ever-larger visitor numbers on fragile historic interiors.
The library at Stourhead
As a professional architectural and garden historian, sometime Secretary of the Georgian Group and the Garden History Society, I have been visiting the National Trust’s historic properties for many years – 50, to be precise, since I was given life membership on my 21st birthday. I recently revisited Stourhead House, and my observations are perhaps relevant to some of the concerns currently exercising Trust members and particularly subscribers to Restore Trust.
I took with me the guidebook written by Kenneth Woodbridge in 1971, which I see I bought on my very first visit to Stourhead in 1974. This was spotted by a volunteer, who exclaimed, “you’ve got the best guidebook there – the new one’s full of photos” – a criticism that has often been made, with some justification, about the current generation of guidebooks (in my view Trust guidebooks reached their highest form in the years of Gervase Jackson-Stops, i.e. the 1980s). The 1971 edition is certainly full of information and thin on glossy photos, but I found as I went round the twilit interiors (this was a bright sunny afternoon but in some rooms it was more or less impossible to see what was on the walls) that in most of the rooms there was a lot less furniture than the guidebook described. Obviously, over the course of nearly half a century it would not be surprising if there had been some rearrangement, but here there had clearly been many deductions. When I mentioned this to the volunteers they said that this was partly because of the current need for social distancing, and they hoped the furniture would return before long.
However, a more general observation concerns sheer pressure of visitor numbers. The car park that afternoon contained literally hundreds of vehicles, and as one might expect on a lovely autumn day the majority of visitors had headed for the sublime landscape garden. But this still left an uncomfortably large number going round the house, to the extent that it seemed to me that if the missing furniture was put back the two things would be incompatible. This raises the more general question of overcrowding at Trust properties versus the erosion of curatorial standards – something eloquently raised at the Trust AGM by Lucy Wood and rather disgracefully dismissed and rubbished on behalf of the Trust by Michael Day. This in turn raises that of the Trust recruiting ever more members, which it does so relentlessly. I recall when reaching the millionth member was considered very remarkable. Now membership is heading for 6 million which, as the Trust website tells us, is ‘more than the entire population of Costa Rica’. How long can this realistically go on if the Trust is not to preside over the destruction, or at very least the serious erosion, of the things that it is supposed to be protecting and curating for the nation? I imagine we all have favourite places – Venice is one of the most obvious – where unconstrained tourism is indeed a very active agent of destruction but where vested interests resist attempts to keep it in check. It seems to me that the National Trust has reached the point when it needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask whether it isn’t high time that it put its marketing strategy back into some kind of proper balance with its absolute duty to protect the places that are actually its raison d’etre.
Incidentally, the much commented-on white cube in the Stourhead entrance hall struck me as puerile and pointless, if perhaps not as visually intrusive as I had expected. On the other hand the two glass screens I encountered in the gardens with quotes from Virgil and Milton seemed entirely apposite in a landscape where the works of those two authors played a formative influence in its design.